Fello works with existing real estate agent CRMs to farm and nurture existing contacts with a number of smart data connections and timely marketing campaigns.
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Fello combines a solution for long-term lead nurture with precise marketing automation.
Platforms: Browser, iOS app
Ideal for: Brokerages, teams, agents, sellers
Initial review: Sept. 2022
Updated: March 2024
Top selling points:
- Targeted lead identification
- Integration of public market data
- Segmented marketing
- Seller and consumer dashboards
- Popular CRM integrations
- Property detail pages
Top concern:
Fello appeals to agents serious about getting the most out of their database. However, the company’s focus could slide if it continues to expand its marketing asset provisions, leading to it becoming redundant with many of what agents are already using.
What you should know
Fello smartly decided to live with its decision to shift from its iBuyer component to instead focus on helping users get the absolute most out of their existing database, the single most under-used business asset of any agent who’s been in the business long enough to have one. I get it; new leads are sexy, but they’re fly-by-night and typically not there in the morning.
The company executes on this intent by championing easy CRM integrations and white-labeling any form of outreach and its user experience.
Fello gleans public databases for mortgage, historic ownership, location, tax and other pertinent aspects of a property to populate the software’s decision-making tools and formulate highly granular marketing email and direct mail campaigns. This can be easily orchestrated through an array of automated distribution sequences. With each step, the content therein can be manually edited when needed.
The CRM linkages are two-way, which is another testament to Fello’s dedication to ensuring its customers get up and running quickly and stay running.
It helps turn forgotten-about contacts into top-of-mind prospects with insightful evaluations of each marketing send (email and print), the timing of each interaction, powerful customization of consumer-facing property dashboards, propensity-to-sell scoring, and countless ways to sort and segment groups of customers.
The overall user UI/UX is industry-leading and aided by an ever-present in-house team of onboarding professionals and success managers.
There are two ways Fello helps its customers excel that are worth highlighting. The first is that it all but guarantees adoption, an absolutely critical factor in the success of any technology decision.
Many very beneficial software solutions have been relegated to the copy room recycle bin due to lackluster interest, either from the person who decided to buy it or the company that sold it. It’s usually a combination.
I mentioned this in our demo, and the Fello team pounced, prepped with a comprehensive explanation of how they do it and why it might be key to their growth.
They told me that if you plan on scaling your proptech, you have to be prepared to support it. Of course, it helps that Fello’s product fulfills its promises. The company takes a new customer from contract to sending their first email in seven days.
“Millions” is what they said they’ve invested in solution experts and above them, success managers. They’re familiar with all the common CRMs to ensure migration goes smoothly, and they are ready to react when a user’s activity slows.
That two-way CRM integration is the second major explanation for the company signing more than 10,000 users and 1,500 teams in under two years of operation.
It should be noted that CEO Ryan Young is an agent, and he has onboarded his team — and it’s one of Ohio’s leading luxury sales groups and one of the nation’s most productive, according to RealTrends.
By working with whatever CRM a customer uses, Fello doesn’t have to sell over it. It also means it’s much more likely to get “mostly” clean data. It has tools and email tactics in place to collect missing fields from a record, a neat strategy that involves turning one-time buyer clients into potential listing leads.
Additionally, a lot of the CRMs Fello’s customers use provide lead-gen tools, meaning that’s one less (very difficult) aspect of business the company doesn’t need to build tools for. Getting the business is usually the harder part anyway.
A number of things remain intact from Fello’s launch days, such as its consumer-facing dashboard that gives them clean, palatable insights on their home’s value and what the market is doing. Each content field on those pages can be toggled on and off by the agent sending it, and to boot, each field can be automatically customized to that user based on home value, location and lead status.
There are agent landing pages that can be published with QR codes linked to a number of different forms of content, as well as the ability to support multiple offices, teams or brands under a single account. Its primary dashboard offers a rundown of new contacts, activity within the system, and updates on page views and lead submissions.
Fello has added trackable direct mail, too, which can be made part of any marketing sequence. Like an email campaign, the automation turns off once the person is classified as a lead. Timers can be set to reactivate it when appropriate. After all, you don’t want to send your buyer a listing pitch on their home’s value six months into ownership.
I can’t stress enough that the timing is better than ever to crack open your database. If you’ve worked with a person before, the hard part is done. With buyer’s agents stressed and everyone else confused at a minimum, things will be a lot easier to explain to someone you know.
Start digging. Remember, current contacts cost a lot less to become leads, which is another point not to be ignored when it comes to Fello’s growth. A customer’s ROI at closing is a lot more attractive when there isn’t a line item on the HUD for a lead referral.
Fello made business decisions quickly after the market gave it feedback, and it stuck to them. I don’t see much of what often worries me with other young proptechs present in this newest iteration of Fello.
There’s a chance they’ll add enough features to pull themselves level with the very CRMs they’re currently making better, but I’m going to reserve that judgment until I get another look down the road. I have no issue giving Fello my highest ranking.
Work your database.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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